This is the official blog about the development of OctoMY™, the robot platform for you!

2015-07-14

Solar energy for cheaps

The robot will need all the power it can get, and solar panels has been a part of the plan from the start.

However, two problems with solar power has been evident that I have not been able to figure out:

They are prohibitively expensive!

They are fragile

Actually the last point may be a solution to both problems in a wired way, because I just discovered that solar cell manufacturers actually sell left over broken cells cheaply by weight or watt. Since they are already broken they will be less likely to break (smaller pieces) and fitting them into a lattice or grid will provide a flexible layout with the redundancy necessary to sustain power after loosing a single cell.

The plan is thus to buy some broken panels, cut them roughly to size and stitch them together in a grid with redundant connections.